Erik Erikson Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

Potentially creative men…build the personal fundament of their work during a self-decreed moratorium, during which they often starve themselves, socially, erotically, and, last but not least, nutritionally in order to let the grosser weeds die out, and make way for the growth of their inner garden.

Erik Erikson
If there is any responsibility in the cycle of life it must be that one generation owes to the next that strength by which it can come to face ultimate concerns in its own way.

Erik Erikson
Children cannot be fooled by empty praise and condescending encouragement. They may have to accept artificial bolstering of their self-esteem in lieu of something better, but what I call their accruing ego identity gains real strength only from wholehearted and consistent recognition of real accomplishment, that is, achievement that has meaning in their culture.

Erik Erikson
The growing child must derive a vitalizing sense of reality from the awareness that his individual way of mastering experience (his ego synthesis) is a successful variant of a group identity and is in accord with its space-time and life plan.

Erik Erikson
In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.

Erik Erikson
There is in every child at every stage a new miracle of vigorous unfolding.

Erik Erikson
Will, therefore, is the unbroken determination to exercise free choice as well as self-restraint, in spite of the unavoidable experience of shame and doubt in infancy.

Erik Erikson
Let us face it: 'deep down' nobody in his right mind can visualize his own existence without assuming that he has always lived and will live hereafter.

Erik Erikson
Nobody likes to be found out, not even one who has made ruthless confession a part of his profession. Any autobiographer, therefore, at least between the lines, spars with his reader and potential judge.

Erik Erikson
Hope is the enduring belief in the attainability of fervent wishes, in spite of the dark urges and rages which mark the beginning of existence. Hope is the ontogenetic basis of faith, and is nourished by the adult faith which pervades patterns of care.

Erik Erikson
The fact that human conscience remains partially infantile throughout life is the core of human tragedy.

Erik Erikson
Hope is both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue inherent in the state of being alive.

Erik Erikson
If life is to be sustained hope must remain, even where confidence is wounded, trust impaired.

Erik Erikson
Children love and want to be loved and they very much prefer the joy of accomplishment to the triumph of hateful failure. Do not mistake a child for his symptom.

Erik Erikson
This sense of identity provides the ability to experience one's self as something that has continuity and sameness, and to act accordingly.

Erik Erikson
What was Freud's Galapagos, what species fluttered what kinds of wings before his searching eyes? It has often been pointed out derisively: his creative laboratory was the neurologist's office, the dominant species hysterical ladies.

Erik Erikson
The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery.

Erik Erikson
Farms and in castles, in homes, studies, and cloisters - where sensible people manage to live relatively lusty and decent lives, as moral as they must be, as free as they may be, and as masterly as they can be. If we only knew it, this elusive arrangement is happiness.

Erik Erikson
Someday, maybe, there will exist a well-informed, well considered and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child's spirit; for such mutilation undercuts the life principle of trust, without which every human act, may it feel ever so good and seem ever so right is prone to perversion by destructive forms of conscientiousness.

Erik Erikson
The identity crisis... occurs in that period of the life cycle when each youth must forge for himself some central perspective and direction, some working unity, out of the effective remnants of his childhood and the hopes of his anticipated adulthood.

Erik Erikson
All world-images are apt to become corrupt when left to ecclesiastic bureaucracies. But this does not make the formation of world-images expendable. And I can only repeat that we deny the remnants of old-world images at our own risk, because we do not overcome them by declaring them — with all the righteousness of skepticism — something of a secret sin. They are not less powerful for being denied.

Erik Erikson
Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.

Erik Erikson
When established identities become outworn or unfinished ones threaten to remain incomplete, special crises compel men to wage holy wars, by the cruelest means, against those who seem to question or threaten their unsafe ideological bases.

Erik Erikson